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12/10/2015

New piece in Investor's Business Daily: "Obama Strategy Focuses On Guns, Not Terrorism"

Here is John Lott's piece in Investor's Business Daily evaluating Obama's first two domestic proposals to protect Americans from terrorism.

On Sunday night, President Obama offered Americans his strategy for protecting them from terrorism. No, he didn’t announce new measures to track down terrorists. Instead, he wants to track down our guns.
This is nothing new. Obama has pushed for more gun control after every mass public shooting. The proposal is the same: more background checks. In reality, the shootings would still have happened.
The first proposal is to keep people on the “no-fly” list from getting guns. However, none of the mass public shooters have been on the “no-fly” list. Even the San Bernardino killers, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, were not on the list. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security had recently cleared Malik to enter the country.
The president’s vague, second proposal is to “make it harder for people to buy powerful assault weapons.” The AR-15s used in the San Bernardino massacre are actually just semi-automatics that fire one bullet at a time. This gun uses the same bullets and fires them in just the same way that a normal hunting rifle does. The AR-15 just happens to look more like an “assault weapon.” . . .